Peeling and pondering

Sometimes, you have to grab a pile of fruit and a knife and make a pie. But really, you just... just... want to peel something.

More even than wood carving, taking knife to fruit is a supremely meditative act of creative destruction.

Care is needed lest you cut yourself, of course, but even if you mangle the fruit, who cares? It's going into a pie anyway, so make with the blade, kiddo, and let your mind wander.

I've been doing a lot of peeling recently, trying to decide how best to proceed with this project.

2015 has been a tumultuous year. My book was published and I was riding high. Then my mother died suddenly and I was left feeling high and low at the same time.

Knife to peel.
Spiraling.
Lengthening.
Try to get it all in one.
Meditate.
Don't cut yourself.

So here I am at the close of the calendar, trying to decide whether I care much for calendars. It's tempting, oh-so-tempting, to think in these discreet blocks of days, months, years. It tempts you to take up the blade.

Peel away the questionable bits.
Cut around the bruises.
Save the good fruit, dispense with the bad.
It's just a pie, it doesn't have to be pretty.

To think in calendars is seductive. It makes it easier to just pretend you can bin the entire year at will or pick or choose in phases of the moon or turning of the seasons. Hell, this entire project is and always has been dependent on calendars for its framework.

In January, can you really begin again? Boot the old man to the curb and pick up the baby in the tophat?

Time is seductive but false.
You can't time a pie, it's done when it's done.
Density, moisture, relative humidity, too many factors at play.
Keep an eye on it and yank it before it burns.

I am about to pick this project back up again. For those of you who have waited patiently while I run off to be an author and have family tragedies, I thank you for your time. I hope you don't feel I've wasted it.

Going forward, we're going to take a more meditative approach and we're going to ignore the calendar. I was wrong about the artificial frameworks for this. I was wrong to think I could just peel it and pop it in the oven and set a timer and it would be done when it dings.

We're going to carve around the worst bits and bruises and try to use the best of the fruit. And we're going to watch the food and let the pie tell us when it's done and time to move on to another pile, another peeler.

Our knives will be sharp and our pies will sometimes be ugly.

I hope you'll join us.

In the meantime, have a happy Christmas or a happy whatever celebration brings you together with your kith and kin this winter's turn. Draw near to those you love and remember those who are missing. Share food and companionship and warmth and remember that they are the only real light that matters in the winter's darkness.

And volunteer in the kitchen when there's stuff to peel.
It'll be good for you.

- Scott

Kill It With Fire, Part Five: Cleaning the kitchens. . . summary and wrapup

"Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen -- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying."

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

This blog began with that quote.

No one begins something like this on a whim. And if I'm honest, the quote that started this insanity was just one of many pebbles that contributed to the avalanche. It might have been the first pebble, but I can hardly blame Mssr. Bourdain for all that followed...

I am tired. More tired than I have been in a long, long time. My new regimen of archery practice didn't help, and for my Elizabethan alter-ego, the invention of Advil is 390-odd years in the future.

Thankfully, I live in that future so I'm not reduced to gnawing on the trunk of the nearest willow tree.

I was an art major, which is a roundabout way of saying that I spent a lot of time working in restaurant kitchens. There wasn't much in Bourdain's book that really surprised me. Of all the oddball jobs I took through the 'starving artist years' that are so fondly spoken of by people who've never lived through them, the restaurant jobs were my favorites.

Was it noble, honorable, and satisfying, as he promised? I dunno. I wasn't a chef, the highest I ever got was prep cook. I certainly didn't make it to culinary school; I spent too much time as a dish dog, really. Nevertheless, the exposure to finer foods and the people who prepared them than I could afford on what they were paying me taught me to appreciate, to taste, food differently.

But this isn't a foodie blog any more than it's intended to be Scottie Goes to Ren Faire. I never really meant for the baking demonstrations at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire to change so drastically how I thought about this project.

I'm still slightly ashamed to admit that it didn't occur to me earlier to set up and attempt one of these trades at anything close to full production level.  How could I ever hope to understand the lives of my craftsmen forebears if I never stepped fully into their shoes?

We'll get to shoes soon, this is about... I almost said it's about bread. It's actually not at all about bread.  Anthony was right about that. It's about craft.

The WMRF demonstrations were always intended to be a sort of safety valve on this project. The faire was scheduled just past the midpoint in the project and I knew that by that time I'd have a fair idea whether or not I thought I'd make it by the end of December. (Though to be honest, I still don't know and you'll see why I've stacked projects as I have in the coming months.)

Like archery, baking was not something I ever thought to enjoy. In my home, I do all the cooking, but The Engineer did all the baking. Baking was too fussy for me, too much like science and not enough like art... or so I thought. It never occured to me that it would be baking that finally put me over to the noble, honorable, and satisfying side of the kitchens.

Those are The Engineer's hands in that photo above. It was also the first time in quite awhile that she and I cooked anything together. Until the recent remodel began, our kitchen was inhospitable to more than one person at a time.

There's finally room for craftsmanship. 

Photo & Digital Manipulation by Dan Hill - © 2013 Used with permission

By God, Tony was right about that. When Dan Hill posted that photo manip above, one of the first comments posted below it (by someone I have never met, mind you) was two words: "Naturally happy."

Bourdain spent the rest of Kitchen Confidential talking about how dog tired he got working the line, how strung out he was on various substances, how much the food business was a scam and how much was genuine, and how arduous the restaurant biz is is, but even now you can see in his shows how much he loved it.

I'm starting to feel that way about bread and baking.

Baking turned out to be more art than science, not as slavishly dedicated to the arcane formulae of moth-eaten texts as I once believed. When my hands were in the dough and our friend Becky had the ovens blazing and Kristin was scooping flour into the bowls while Becky's husband Douglas was working the rope line, charming the tourists with his English accent and well-rehearsed dialogue about the history of English baking... here was an element of jazz. 

And always the crowds lined up at the edge of our area, asking questions and carrying away my card or the address of this blog scribbled on a bit of paper. At one point, we scrawled a diagram and the URL for this project on a chalkboard and folks were taking photos of it with their phones.

I hope you found your way here without any trouble. I hope that you learned something that day at the faire when you stumbled across our mad adventure in the land of yeast and flour. God knows that we certainly did.

That Corgi was an excellent student...

The Oven's End...

The oven at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire site was never meant to last. Not only did we build it from the cheapest materials, we taxed them to their uttermost extremes. By the end of the last day of the fair, the cracks were no longer superficial. The ceiling and the framing around the door were beginning to deteriorate and I decided to bake a few final pies and call it a day.

We let the oven cool and went our separate ways to enjoy the fun and frivolity that we'd missed the other weekends of the faire due to tending our breads.  When the final cannon sounded the end of the faire, we gathered one last time around our hearth...

The Engineer had the honor of the first whack.

Then Becky and Douglas, who were so eager to leave they were already changed into civilian clothes...

Then it was left to me. It felt a little wrong, like putting down a family pet. It had stood us in good stead, generated far in excess of its capacity and kept going strong. But the heat and desolation of the days standing in front of it got the better of me and I let the hammer swing.

And soon it was all over.  It arrived at the faire site in buckets and would leave by the shovel full, loaded in the bed of my truck...

The final tally for our little wood-fired bakery: 220 loaves, eight pies, nine scones, two loaves of soda bread, and 1 apple tart, utilizing 1/2 bushel of apples, 80+ lbs of flour, and several gallons of ale. 

Thanks to my partners in floury crime: Kristin Perkins, Kelsey Fahy, and Becky & Douglas Norton. Thank you to Pat, Tracy, and Amy of the Washington Renaissance Arts & Entertainment Society (WRAES) and all the cast and crew of the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire.  I hope you enjoyed the bread we dispersed to your tables each day from our bakery.  Thank you to all the photographers that documented the events and kindly sent me their photographs and videos.

There is, as always a sense of melancholy as we end one thing, and a sense of hope as we embark on the next.

Stay tuned to this channel. I doubt this is the last time we will see the fruit of an oven such as this. I still have the one in my back yard, after all...

~ Scott

Tools of the Trades: Dumb as a...

I don't know if it's a real memory or something my adolescent brain concocted after the fact, but I remember a day when my grandpa swore that something or someone was "Dumb as a bag of hammers." Being a kid that took an inordinate amount of joy from the tools grandpa let him use, in the memory I told him I didn't understand why that would be dumb. I couldn't think of anything better than a Whole Bag of Hammers!

I'm mostly suspicious of the memory because it makes me sound rather more precocious and clever than I suspect that I really was. It's one of the oddments of life that you can't always trust your own memories, but there you go.

Be that as it may, I still get an inordinate amount of joy out of my tools. And now that I actually have enough hammers to fill a bag, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that this apocryphal memory holds a kernal of truth: There really aren't many things cooler than a Whole Bag of Hammers.

I suppose that some of you are, quite correctly, pointing out that there's also a half dozen mallets in that bag. All the same, there are enough hammers to make the bag rather heavier than I'd like to tote around.

For the record, this isn't an example of excess. Each of those hammers (and mallets) has a specific purpose to which it is best suited. It is enormously frustrating to me to watch someone use the wrong hammer for their task. Or, worse yet, to use something else like a wrench in place of a hammer.

My wife thinks I need to seek professional help.

Believe it or not, there is a distinct difference between a claw hammer, a rip hammer, and a ball peen hammer. The face of each hammer is shaped to best suit the task for which it was intended, and the temper of the metal as well. Try to form metal with a claw hammer and you'll get a good idea why you shouldn't, no matter what Jamie from Mythbusters might wish you to believe. Will a hammer explode on you if you're using it wrong? No, that's a bit silly. But you will expend more energy than you would if you went to the toolbox and got the correct tool.

It's difficult to choose favorites, but if you put my feet to the fire, I think the shoemaker's hammer you see above is my favorite. Aesthetically, it's just intrinsically pleasing. Like the distilled cartoony ideal of the essence of hammerness. It's shape and the domed face are designed for shaping shoeleather, condensing the leather and forcing it down over the last without damaging or marring the finish.

The horn hammer underneath it is also a leatherworking tool used by mask makers for much the same purpose. The point of the horn forces leather down into the voids of the mask matrix as it condenses and hardens the leather. This also has the charming effect of dimpling the leather, giving the mask a characteristic look you can't get otherwise. 

These mallets serve various purposes. Top is a felloe mallet. These were originally used and made by wheelwrights, who would cut them from old sections of wheel. These sections are properly called "felloes". Pop a handle on it and sell it to your fellow craftsmen and you've got a lucrative sideline. Like most woodworkers, I use mine for carving and whacking chisels.

Next one down is a rawhide mallet. That head is made from rolled rawhide leather that has been varnished into a nice, hard, mallet head. The resultant head is hard enough to drive a chisel if you've a mind to, but not hard enough to knock a dent into wood. I bought it to use on leather tools, but since I rarely tool my leathergoods, it's mostly used in cabinetmaking.

The two gavel-looking mallets are also for cabinetmaking. They're used to knock together mortise and tenon joinery and also to set the blades in wood-body planes. I'll discuss those a lot more when we're in the joinery section of the project.

Of course, these are but a few of the mallets and hammers I'll use in the course of this year. Ball-peen hammers, blacksmithing and sheet metal hammers, even a mason's rock hammer. All of them serve a specific purpose, and have evolved over centuries, even millennia, into their current shapes.

So give a care to the humble hammer and choose the correct one for your task. Both you and your project will thank you.

Oh, and keep them in a toolbox. Don't keep them in a bag. Because grandpa was right; that is kinda dumb.

~Scott

News: Plus Stuff and Tools and OMG all the STUFF!!!

Beard = Serious Scholar

I've been silent for awhile as I do important things like acquire hard-to-find tools, rare books, and grow a new beard (very important, I am told for these historical research projects). Seriously, I've been travelling all over the country, visiting family, haunting antique stores, and generally ramp up the behind-the-scenes portions of this effort and tie off a bunch of projects both personally and professionally that will be on-hold while I'm doing this.

I seriously think that at some point in the recent past all of the antique tools in America were loaded in trucks and hauled to rural Missouri.

My studio is starting to look like Brueghel's Satire of a Merchant's Greed.  Which might be the nerdiest reference I've made in recent memory... Also, Amazon has started sending me emails that say things like "Special sale for our customers who like hammers..."

Yes.

Oh, and while doing this, I've been applying and interviewing for a full-time job at the college where I am currently working part-time. Which will seriously change the dynamic of this project if I get it.

And I really hope I do get it. Not because a potential background checker might see this post but because it sounds like an awesome job that I'd really enjoy that would allow me to actually use the skills I paid tuition dollars to learn.

(Gasp!)

I bring this up because I haven't before, and we need to start this with everyone knowing that I will be fitting this project in the spaces around my "Real Life". Yes, I will be "getting 500 years behind" in my free time, which is an unfortunately limited commodity. This project is about pursuing my deep and abiding desire to LEARN ALL THE THINGS (as we say on the interwebs) not about putting food on the table, so anything that pays will inevitably take first chair.

Image Inserted to Meet the guidelines set forth in the International Treaty 

for Internet Meme Propagation, 921.4, section C, subsection L9

The upshot being that I might actually be ready for this.

(Panics and runs to re-check that everything is in order for the umpteen millionth time.)